The present invention relates generally to methods and apparatuses for interfacing with the Internet, and more particularly to a method and apparatus for interfacing with the Internet that permits users without programming backgrounds to add and alter content on Internet websites.
The Internet is the fastest growing information market of the twentieth century. While the exact growth rate of the Internet is often disputed, it is beyond question that the number of users on the Internet has at least doubled each year since 1992. There are presently over 30 million Internet users worldwide and at least 15 million users in the United States alone. As more and more people tap into the Internet's powerful information and communications resources, the Internet will continue to grow exponentially and generate billions of dollars of annual revenues, for those able to communicate effectively on the Internet.
One of the great attractions of publishing on the World Wide Web is the immediacy of the medium. A page of an entire Web site can be updated corrected or even completely overhauled in minutes and instantly made available to these millions of people--if one knows how to code text and images in the Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML.
While HTML coding is not a difficult skill to master, it remains one that many computer literate people have not yet learned. Certainly HTML coding remains a skill that the top executives of most companies lack. So when time-sensitive news breaks, or prices or inventory change, or a new manager is hired, these executives often find themselves facing a system every bit as slow and dependent on outside contractors as the print media. Often they have to place a call to a Web production house to get timely information to the public or employees. This can mean having to wait several hours, days or even weeks for a busy programming team to make requested changes and for an update to actually appear on the company's Web site.
This actually limits the success of a company's Internet marketing because the company cannot respond as fast as the medium, which means that in-house delays can appear as failures of Internet marketing, which can lead a company to discard its Internet marketing. When in point of fact the actual reason is that web surfers who know that a company does not update its web site frequently with new information will adapt their surfing patterns to the web site update frequency.
To hold the attention of these web surfers and to keep them returning to a company's web site at a relatively high frequency, web sites must be updated frequently. For example, a company that immediately updates its prices based on changes by its competition may be able to prevent existing customers from crossing over to the competition despite attempts by the competition to underprice it. At a minimum, the company may be able to prevent a price change announced on the Internet from having any significant effect on the market share it currently holds by essentially reducing the time period during which a price differential exists to an insignificant amount. In fact, once the competition realizes that they cannot create a price differential that has any lasting effect, they may not even attempt a price change.
The present invention is therefore directed to the problem of developing a method and apparatus for editing Web sites on the Internet that permits one to make changes to Web sites in a user friendly way without requiring detailed knowledge of Internet text and graphics programming techniques.